Just started using Krita again mainly for my daughter who loves to draw with various apps. I'm running Ubuntu 14.04, but with Gnome Shell. Krita crashes very often. At first, it crashed during save, randomly while drawing, during export to JPEG.

At times, it also seems to halt, while at other times, it runs quite fast. During these halting states, it continues to accept input, so for example, my daughter hit undo, nothing happened, so she kept hitting it and, once krita seemingly caught up with itself, her drawing went back to nothing Other times, she was zoomed in for shading and, after the halt, her drawing of an animal looked like a bush.

Everything else runs smoothly on this machine.

Some basic googling lead me to uninstall a package called qt-at-spi. Afterwards, it no longer crashed with _every_ save attempt. Other results suggest changing the qt theme. I'm not running qt, though, and I'm unsure of how to go about this. I installed something called qt4-configure and then ran qt4-qtconfig, but I see no single place where I can switch themes. I searched for specifics and crash info, and found a plethora of crash issues/bug reports.

Rather than googling further, I decided to comment at this point. Love or hate Ubuntu, there's no doubt that it and its derivatives are very commonly used distros. It seems reasonable and practical that specific efforts be made to make krita work well with Ubuntu. Or at least, a simple, step-by-step, how-to. I realize that sometimes, Ubuntu doesn't come with the "stuff" that all distros used to come with, and I have no problem installing missing scripting languages, build-tools and the like. If there is a procedure for making krita actually usable in Ubuntu, please, provide the link.

Now, I'm not new. I've used, for example, apps like OpenShot, which can crash, along with the Flash issues over the years, etc., but I've never used anything as unstable as krita.

Perhaps restrict older, more stable, versions in the repos, for now, until it matures? I've recently installed a Peppermint system on someone's older PC that used to run XP and installed krita for them as well. At this point, I'm hoping they don't actually try and use krita, or they may run their install disks and go back to XP.

The thing is, we as Krita developers are completely powerless when it comes to what Ubuntu does. The issues with qt-at-spi are just one thing, the mess they make with the menubar is another thing... We don't control which version Ubuntu ships either, though we do provide development builds for testing in the Krita Lime repository:

https://launchpad.net/~dimula73/+archive/ubuntu/krita

It would be a good idea to have setup instructions in the FAQ on krita.org, but they need to be re-checked with every release of Ubuntu. Myself, I've tried Krita on 14:10, and the qt-at-spi problem doesn't happen for me, but the menus are still a mess.

Well, it's strange, because I am on 13.10, with gnome, and everything's peachy.

So whatever they changed in the meantime must be really strange...

Why not target just the LTS releases then? As long as you have a procedure, people will do it if they want to use krita. Here is a site I often check:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Trusty

It's at least a good starting point. What it says about krita is to install the Caligra suite. It mentions nothing about qt themes or removing any qt packages. Surely some of the devs have access to Ubuntu. Could one of them spend a few hours making it work in a usable manner and then write something simple up? Would installing the whole suite help--this is something I haven't tried yet, ironically enough.

Anyway, a write-up would only have to be altered, what, every 2 years? I don't know how many packages you share with K3b, but it's a qt/kde app that I've been using pretty much since it was released, regardless of distro or desktop. It's very KDE-esque, using kde file open/save dialogs, etc., and always works like a charm.

I don't like Unity either, which is why I'm using Gnome Shell (uses a fraction of the ram on my system, runs faster, is the only UI that is actually usable both via touch and mouse)--many things about Ubuntu that irk me as a long time linux user (~1998).